It is known in the art to provide an “overlay” network on top of the publicly-routable Internet. The overlay network may leverage existing content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure. The overlay network provides performance enhancements for any application that uses Internet Protocol (IP) as a transport protocol by routing around down links or finding a path with a smallest latency. As is well known, the Internet Protocol (IP) works by exchanging groups of information called packets, which are short sequences of bytes comprising a header and a body. The header describes the packet's destination, which Internet routers use to pass the packet along until it arrives at its final destination. The body contains the application data. Typically, IP packets travel over Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which provides reliable in-order delivery of a stream of bytes. TCP rearranges out-of-order packets, minimizes network congestion, and re-transmits discarded packets.
TCP performance suffers as the round trip time between two endpoints increases. Longer round trip times result in increased connection establishment time, increased time to ramp up throughput during slow start, increased retransmit timeouts leading to decreased throughput, and throughput limitations imposed by receive window (especially if window scaling is not enabled).